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Today we announced the Adobe Open Screen Project which is dedicated to ensuring a consistent rich Internet experience across a broad range of digital screens and form factors including mobile phones, consumer electronics, televisions and personal computers. This experience will be driven by Adobe Flash Player and in the future Adobe AIR and is meant to ensure that designers and developers can focus on the consumer experience and know their efforts will scale across different platforms and screens. Simply put the mission of the Open Screen Project is meant to enable a consistent runtime environment for designers and developers across desktops and devices.

Ryan Stewart has some great thoughts about what this means for the desktop space and below are my impressions of what this means for the non-PC space and developers.

Who’s involved
In order for the Open Screen Project to be successful we need the support of companies that believe in this unified vision of the future. These companies include leading chipset vendors, device manufacturers, operators and media companies – all intent to help deliver consistent rich internet applications across a broad range of devices and desktops. These are the initial companies that are involved with the project and we expect other companies will want to join.

• Adobe
• ARM
• BBC
• Chunghwa Telecom
• Cisco
• Intel
• LG Electronics
• Marvell
• Motorola
• MTV Networks
• NBC Universal
• Nokia
• NTT DoCoMo
• Qualcomm
• Samsung Electronics
• Sony Ericsson
• Toshiba
• Verizon Wireless

Flash and Adobe AIR to be Free
To support this project we will be opening access to more of our core technologies to help enable web innovation and include these initiatives:

• Removing restrictions on the use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
• Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
• Removing license fees – making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free
• Publishing the Adobe Flash Cast protocol and AMF protocol for robust data services

What should mobile developers do
Keep on creating the types of experiences and content you already do for mobile phones using CS3, Device Central and other tools for development and testing. The key thing you should take away from the Open Screen Project is Adobe is committed to providing a consistent runtime across a wide range of devices including personal computers so continuing to build your skills now to develop Flash Lite applications will be part of the future growth opportunities for you and your clients as Flash and Adobe AIR are supported on non-PC devices. In short, learning how to build mobile experiences now will be your differentiator.

It’s true that today desktop developers can use Flex and Flash to create web content and Adobe AIR applications and mobile developers can use Flash CS3 to create Flash Lite content for supported handsets. In the near future desktop developers will be able to use their skills for creating Flash and Adobe AIR applications for more than just desktop PCs. What will improve will be the workflow and output options for Flash and Adobe AIR applications and for us that’s important – to ensure that designers and developers have the best tools so they can focus on the experience.

Types of non-PC devices
One of the main benefits to OSP is the ability for us to provide to designers and developers a runtime environment that works across a wide range of non-PC devices, in addition to the PC space. I use the term “non-PC” often but to give you some context these are some of the types of devices we’re looking to support in the future:

• mobile phones
• mobile Internet tablets (MIDs)
• set top boxes
• televisions

Over 1 billion devices by 2010 2009
We’ve updated our device forecast and expect that by 2009 there will be over 1 billion devices that will have shipped that support Flash technologies. Previously we stated that we would reach this number by 2010 – so this is more good news for the Open Screen Project and shows the explosive growth of Flash technologies in mobile phones. These are cummulative shipments, not the devices in peoples pockets.

Next steps
If you’re a desktop developer and have read this you’re probably starting to envision a very cool future where you’re able to extend your applications beyond just the desktop. Our take on it is that in the future you’ll be building your mobile applications first, and adding elements for the desktop, for me that’s the future. I’ve only touched on some of the high-level points here and there certainly will be more news coverage about this initiative over the next few days and weeks. If you have any questions about this please leave a comment here and I’ll answer them.

You can read more about the Open Screen Project here as well as an FAQ.